"It's always good to be ranked and it's a starting point for us. Hopefully,we'll play good enough to merit moving up in the poll as the season movesalong."

It's the ninth straight year Georgia has been ranked in the preseason poll, but the lowest it has been since 2001, Mark Richt's first year, when the Bulldogs were unranked.

The Bulldogs' preseason rank through the years:

2009: 13

2008: 1

2007: 13

2006: 14

2005: 13

2004: 4

2003: 9

2002: 11

2001: NR

2000: 11

1999: 13

1998: 13

1997: 25

Florida comes in at No. 3 in the poll, while Alabama, as expected, is first. But to me the next three SEC teams, all from the West, are a bit of surprise: No. 16 LSU, No. 19 Arkansas and No. 23 Auburn. So the coaches are giving LSU a bit more love than the media did down in Hoover.

Interestingly, while South Carolina was one point away from Georgia in that media vote, the Gamecocks did not make the top 25. (They were 35th, behind even Mississippi, picked to finish near the bottom of the West.)

4 comments:

If it was my poll I would put UGA at around 16, swapping us with LSU. (Can you still feel that AJ Green penalty reverberating? If we beat LSU we finish 9-4, and the expectations and offseason talk are completely different.)

Also, Fla may be the most overranked team in this poll. How do you lose a ton of NFL talent, your qb, and your DC and still get preseason ranked 3? I would put them at around 10 or 11.

Why wouldn't you mention where Georgia Tech is ranked in this post?? I understand I can just go look at it--but def the fact that they're ranked ahead of us is maybe the most interesting news off the poll

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About the Author

Seth Emerson has been covering the SEC and Georgia (on and off) since 2002. He worked at the Albany Herald from 2002-05, then spent five years at The State in Columbia, S.C., covering South Carolina. He returned to Athens in August of 2010, only to find that David Pollack and David Greene were no longer playing for the Bulldogs. Adjustments were made.

Emerson is originally from Silver Spring, Md., and graduated from Maryland in 1998 with a degree in journalism and a minor in getting lost on the way to practically everywhere. Then he spent four years at The Washington Post, covering small colleges, a couple NCAA basketball tournaments, and on one glorious day, was yelled at by Tony Kornheiser. It was probably at The Post that he also learned to write in the third person.

These days he lives in Athens with his beloved and somewhat wimpy dog, Archie. Together they fight crime at night in northeast Georgia, except on nights there is no crime, in which case they sit at home, sip on white wine and watch reruns of "Mad Men."